TELUS Communications - Support Department of the Year

Company:TELUS Communications, Edmonton, AB, CanadaCompany Division/Group:National Field SupportCompany Description:TELUS is a leading national telecommunications company in Canada, with $10.9 billion of annual revenue and 13.1 million customer connections. In support of our philosophy to give where we live, TELUS, our team members and retirees have contributed more than $300 million to charitable and not-for-profit organizations and volunteered 4.8 million hours of service in the communities we serve.Nomination Category:Support CategoriesNomination Sub Category:Support Department of the Year

Nomination Title:TELUS National Construction Enablement and Field Support

Tell the story about what this nominated department has achieved since 1 January 2016 (up to 650 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms.

The key priorities for TELUS National Construction Enablement and Field Support are:

- Securing a positive customer experience (TV, Internet and Home Phone) by ensuring the placement of fibre drops and confirming the provisioning of customer requests prior to consumer or business customer due dates
- Enabling field technicians to secure the build of demand and planned networks to ensure we are offering our customers the latest and greatest technology
- Proactively protect the integrity of our copper and fibre-cable infrastructure by contributing to increased network reliability
- Providing world-class, real-time technical and testing support to field technicians during installation and repair of TELUS products and services

Challenge:

As the world’s insatiable appetite for bandwidth growths, TELUS has taken a leadership position in building fibre to our customers. Our challenge is to ensure our teams are increasing support demand to complement the volume and complexity of fibre growth. As a team, we continue to attack the market with fierce focus on driving growth and demonstrating our service leadership by supporting end to end of fibre expansion, starting with build, managing of the fibre drops and providing support for field forces and our partner teams.

Action:

National Construction Enablement and Field Support responded to these challenges by taking the following actions:

1. Drop Support Team – Implemented a new customer premise connection management system utilizing Salesforce.com that had increased our ability to ensure the physical connection is in place before the customer service installation date. This system has greatly increased the team’s capacity and reduced instances where installation technicians arrive at the customer premise with no physical connection in place.
- Reduced incomplete customer installations related to physical connection issues by 40% in 2016 (greatly reducing customer effort of having to book a 2nd installation date)
- Increased team productivity by over 100% generating over $700K in efficiency savings annually

2. CSD Field Support Team – Restructured the team through a partnership with TELUS International. This enabled significant productivity improvements across the team and eliminated large volumes of backlogged customer impacting work.
- Reduced processing time for field technician inside premise changes from over 90 days to 24 hours greatly improving the customer experience (ensuring the charges will show up on the first billing cycle after the work has been completed)
- Enabled the team to manage a 250% increase in customer related inside premise charges while generating over $500K in efficiency savings annually

3. National Field Support Team - Implemented a chat support system for field forces and other internal teams
- Established a chat support model giving field forces and internal teams immediate assistance when needed
- Fully pressurized agents with a combination of on and off queue work allowing for efficient productivity growth within the team
- Increased ownership and improved chat interactions by enhanced quality monitoring and implementing after chat surveys
- Ability to support additional 22% of volume compared to previous model
- 94% of chat surveys rated as very good or excellent from our stakeholders

4. National Field Support Team - Implemented a call satisfaction survey system for field technicians
- Launched automated post call survey system to capture the voice of the field technicians and enhance customer and technician experience
- 93% of survey responses ranked satisfaction as very good to excellent
- Adopted a coaching excellence model

In bullet-list form, briefly summarize up to ten (10) accomplishments of the nominated department since the beginning of 2016 (up to 150 words).

-Implemented chat support with 94% of chat surveys rated as very good or excellent
-Implemented a call satisfaction survey for field technicians achieving a 93% satisfaction rating of very good to excellent
-Reduced processing time for field technician inside premise charges from 90 days to 24 hours greatly improving the customer experience
-Reduced incomplete customer installations related to physical connection issues by 40%
-Adopted a coaching excellence model utilizing technician comments to improve agent performance

Key accomplishments achieved to evolve the business operations and drive efficiencies

-Implemented Salesforce.com system increasing productivity and generating $700K in Opex savings
-Restructured the CSD Field Support team through a partnership with TELUS International generating over $500K in Opex savings
-Implemented a chat support system enabling the team to support a 22% increase in volumes